Rising up:
Stories from the pandemic

2021 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Lucy Ware High Impact Retired Teachers of Black and Brown Children, Center for Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh

“If you are curious and creative, you’ll want to be a part of this group.”

So began the invitation to an afterschool class for 5th and 6th graders from schools across the city, called “Time Traveling Pittsburgh.” Designed by teacher Lucy Ware, the multimedia course was intended to help participants locate themselves in a time and a place that has a history. Students recorded the sounds of their neighborhoods and wrote poems about their identities. They visited a market in Ghana via Google Earth, made a historical timeline, and learned about using perspective in visual art by studying the photographs of Teenie Harris. Throughout the course, held once a week from January through May 2021, Ware used writing, visual art, and other forms of media to engage students in learning about Pittsburgh and about themselves.

“Time Traveling Pittsburgh” was one of six courses offered through the High Impact Retired Teachers of Black and Brown Children program, funded by The Grable Foundation, and created by the Center for Urban Education (CUE), which is part of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education. While classes were held online due to Covid-19, they had been developed before the onset of the virus because of another kind of pandemic: the lack of culturally responsive education and positive identity affirmation for Black children. To help address that gap, the courses were created specifically for Black students.

The program originated with T. Elon Dancy, executive director of CUE. When he spoke to teachers during planning meetings, Ware recalls, he described having been “a bright child, but not being able to ask questions.” She provided that space for students, including welcoming their questions about challenging topics, such as the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd and the controversies over statues that demean Black individuals and Black culture.

Ware also introduced a wide range of Black historical figures in her lessons. Typically in schools, she says, “The culture that African-Americans bring and people of color bring is not highlighted. It’s ignored except for Black History Month. And then it’s just the same people trotted out every time.” For students, “It doesn’t bring a sense that I can do more than what I’m doing right now and that I have a legacy of people who’ve done great things before me.”

The courses were framed along the lines of the Freedom Schools, which were formed during the Civil Rights movement in response to the low quality education offered to Black students and the systematic removal of Black teachers from public schools. One of the earmarks of the Freedom Schools, Ware says, is that students knew their teachers loved them. She thinks Dancy sought out retired teachers for the program because of the combination of nurturing and high standards experienced teachers could provide.

Working with Pitt undergraduate Durga Ramachandran, who served as an assistant, Ware tried to make her class highly engaging. She used brightly colored backgrounds on her screen, played music students liked during breaks, asked them to guess what was in a box at the beginning of each module, and used a virtual spinning wheel to select whose turn would be next. She also included games and YouTube videos, from Alicia Keys performing the Black National Anthem to an instructional video on how to revise sentences. Their efforts paid off, she says: students showed up each week eager to participate. By the end, “I was delighted by how much laughter we had.”

Ware brought years of reflective teaching practice to the project, mainly in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, where she also worked as a reading coach and a literacy coach. And for more than 30 years she has been a Fellow of the Western PA Writing Project, an organization that supports teachers of writing. Experiences early in her career with teaching more than one grade level in the same room, and teaching in a “self-contained” classroom (where one teacher is responsible for every subject), taught her to differentiate lessons for students’ varying skill levels and to adapt a curriculum for project-based learning. But it was her last school, Pittsburgh Dilworth PreK-5, that had the greatest impact on her teaching philosophy.

When Ware began teaching at the Highland Park school, less than 20 children were identified as “gifted.” Like other PPS elementary school students, they went to the Pittsburgh Gifted Center once a week for specialized instruction. Ware recalls that the principal at the time, Monica Lamar, believed there were many more students who were talented at the school, even if they didn’t meet the specified criteria for giftedness. The school switched to an in-house gifted program, and provided access for students whose grades were high, regardless of whether they had the gifted label.

With training provided by the Gifted Center, Ware became the gifted and talented resource teacher for the school. When students realized that if they raised their grades they could study puppetry or animation, or take one of her other project-based classes, “it became a real achievement boost,” she says. Eventually she taught more than 100 students in classes throughout the week. She saw that all students could be motivated, that acceleration could positively affect self-esteem, and that “students will struggle with something that [is] difficult if they felt like they were smart.”

After retiring in 2015, Ware volunteered at Dilworth until the pandemic closed the doors. When asked what the district should prioritize this year, she speaks as an advocate for children. “I think that they should bring joy back into the classroom,” she says, “because it’s lost.” She isn’t talking about blissful ignorance. Holding discussions where students can be critical about what’s happening in the world is vital, too. Teachers “need to be able to allow that to happen in a classroom. Not that rubber stamp, everything is beautiful.” As the need for the CUE courses shows, “It’s not beautiful for everybody,” she says.

CUE is currently seeking funding to continue the project. For more information about the courses, or about similar projects that involve retired teachers, contact Cassandra Brentley at Cassandrabrentley@pitt.edu or 412-383-3450.